Ford still maintains a "high bar" with segment leadership by the F-150. Fiat Chrysler has just introduced a sleeker new skin for its challenger Ram. So Chevrolet needed something to help the new version of its Silverado, the No. 2 pickup brand in the land, to stand out in today's noisy scrum around the highly coveted buyers of the auto industry's highest-profit vehicles.

And Silverado's gambit came in the form of a tailgate fob. That's right -- one of the "50 industry firsts" in the new Silverado is a device so simple that it's very surprising no one has come up with something like it before: Chevy offers a key fob for Silverado owners to close the tailgates of their trucks easily, without having to free one arm, or set down their load, or lower their shoulder to reach it or high-kick it to get it shut.

Smartly, the fob itself is the punch line of one of the three TV ads Chevrolet has fielded in its advertising campaign around the model's launch.

"We have a lot of great product stories to tell with all these industry firsts in Silverado, and that is one of the more innovative and most compelling," Paul Edwards, Chevy's vice president of marketing, told me. "It's what consumers told us they wanted. There are lots of things we're going to talk about through the launch of the truck, but that was a 'Wow!' for sure and is very easy to demonstrate in a TV spot. It's not a complicated technology. But simple innovations sometimes go furthest."

It would be difficult to understate the import of a great launch for the new Silverado. At a time when fading sales of sedans and competition among prolific lineups of SUVs have elevated the importance of full-size pickup truck sales -- and of their beefy profits -- to their highest levels ever for the Detroit Three, GM still narrowly trails Ford for full-size pickup-market share even while combining sales of GMC Sierra with Silverado, while Ram trails both companies.

"It is exciting and it's a challenge" to market Silverado against this backdrop, Edwards said. "The truck space in America today is more and more challenging because of all the competitors and competitive pressure we have. But we're looking at it as an opportunity because Silverado is an all-new truck and our most advanced ever. It's an opportunity to disrupt the marketplace and make ourselves known and take from competitors."

The fierce battle for pickup buyers was illustrated on Monday evening during the college-football championship telecast, when Silverado, F-150 and Ram all were the subject of ads during one of America's most-watched TV broadcasts of the year. Silverado featured another one of its new commercials, this one helping position the nameplate as a straddler of the traditional marketplace of farmers, ranchers, contractors and country folk and of the newer target of city dwellers and lifestyle buyers. The lyrics of, "A Little Bit Country, A Little Bit Rock 'n Roll," provide the narrative.

"We're speaking to two different audiences, the first of which is our core audience," Edwards acknowledged. "Those are people who currently are within the full-size-truck segment. The good thing about Chevy Silverado and Chevrolet overall is that we already have a deep, strong relationship with that core audience. We'll be looking to pull different levers to strengthen that relationship, and that's a majority of our customers.

"In addition to that, we also look at the opportunity target, at people coming new to full-size pickups. That segment grew dramatically over the last five years. There is an opportunity to attract them to Silverado and grow our overall business."

Promoting actual product advances in pickup trucks is relatively difficult, in part because the basic form of the vehicle is deliberately kept essentially the same by all manufacturers, in their important concession to the functionality of the form. That's why it's crucial for Chevrolet to effectively handle the marketing of those tweaks in Silverado that it can describe as "firsts" or at least advances over the competition in their ever-intensifying game of leapfrog.

Besides the fob-controlled tailgate, for instance, the new Silverado's Durabed "is the most functional bed in its class -- more functional than Ford and Ram for sure," Edwards boasted. He cited the ability of the space to provide enough amenities to comprise a "living area," including its power outlets, lighting system, room within the bed and overall functionality.

"The [advertising] team came up with an idea that there were so many features built in that you could actually live in the bed of the truck," Edwards said. So one of the experiential prongs in Chevy's new campaign for Silverado is providing a "unique lodging experience" for some lucky customers who win an activation called Hotel Silverado on the infield of the Daytona 500 NASCAR race in February. The American Cancer Society is helping to choose a "deserving family" who also are stock-car-racing fans.

Another innovation in marketing the new Silverado will be an image of the new vehicle "breaking through" the brown-paper packaging on 7.1 million boxes of merchandise being delivered by Amazon.

I have broad interests and experience as a journalist, covering the auto business, the consumer-packaged goods industry, entrepreneurship, and others, as well as politics, culture, media and religion. I used to cover the car business for The Wall Street Journal, which nomin...